‘Tonight is more than I can take,’ said Thomas Stern. ‘Otherwise I would offer to escort you around the celebrations.’ He arrived beside her, on the bench.
He now wore a thick brown sweater. His broad face was scarcely less brown. He smiled at Martha from six inches’ distance and she smiled back. There was a total lack of haste, of urgency, in this exchange. They regarded each other steadily, then he took her hand and held it against his cheek.
‘What a pity I have to go back to the farm tonight.’
‘And that I have to see Athen!’
‘Are you having an affair with Athen?’
‘Good heavens, no!’
He now held her hand pressed down with his on his warm knee.
‘Why shouldn’t you?’
‘Have you seen Athen’s new suit?’
‘Of course.’
‘Has he talked to you about it?’
‘Martha, I tell you, there are some things spoiled people like you don’t understand.’
‘Rubbish. But I believe that Athen has sentenced himself to death because he is ashamed of liking nice wine and looking beautiful in his new suit.’
Thomas regarded her steadily. Her hand, between his hot knee and his large hand, seemed to be melting into his flesh. He was waiting for her to stop being childish.
‘Just imagine all the people today who are secretly sorry the war is over because now they have to start living.’
‘Yes, but Athen is not one of them. Why are you so angry with him? I agree with him. There’s nothing wrong with being a barmaid, but it’s not for Maisie. It’s not good for her. I went into the bar to see her. Athen is right.’
‘What she needs is a husband, so what’s the use of…’ Martha’s voice grew steadily more angry. ‘She’s in love with Athen.’
‘When it comes to women and love, then I have nothing to say. Yes, she needs a husband. If I wasn’t married, I’d offer myself, if it would make you happy.’
‘Well, I’m not going to tell Maisie that she should be a shop assistant or something. Why don’t you, or Athen, tell her, instead of getting at me about it?’
Thomas regarded her very seriously for some moments. Then he smiled. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Martha.’
‘What?’
‘You’re thinking: This Thomas, what a damned peasant.’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘Well, I am. I’m a peasant. I’m a Polish peasant. I’m a Jewish Polish peasant.’
‘Well then?’
‘You’re looking even thinner and sicker than before. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Everything, everything, everything. And besides, it has only just recently occurred to me that I’m a neurotic, and I don’t like the idea.’
‘Well, of course, all women in the West are neurotic.’
Now Martha started to laugh. She loved Thomas because with him, there was nothing for it but to laugh.
‘And you find me attractive because I’m all thin and tense and difficult?’
‘Of course. When I was a boy in our village, all us clever young men, we used to go to town to see American films and look at the women. We knew what was wrong with them. We understood Western women absolutely. We used to make jokes.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Yes. Just like Africans now. They look at white women in exactly the same way we used to look at women in the films or in the magazines. So of course I’m delighted to see you all tensed up and decadent, comrade Martha. It’s the fulfilment of my favourite fantasy.’
Martha laughed again. All the same, part of her was saying: But this isn’t what I want. For one thing, I’ll be going to England soon.
‘And your wife?’ she said.
Thomas’s hands dropped like stone. ‘Yes, Martha,’ he said, looking dejected. ‘You’re right to ask but there’s nothing I can say. I don’t know.’ He got up, went across the room, fiddled with the door of the pamphlet cupboard, then turned back to face her.
‘The thing is, Martha, I have affairs all the time, you know that.’
She waited, merely looking at him curiously. She thought: I didn’t want to have an affair with Solly because he’s so childish. He’s an idiot. Now I’m afraid to have an affair with Thomas because he’s not childish.
But in any case, what’s the point, if I’m leaving.
Thomas came back, sat close to her, and put his two large hands on her shoulders, where they spread slow, calm areas of warmth.
‘This evening I said to myself: I’ll find Martha, then I’ll take her for a drive or something. Then I thought: No, that’s not for us, we don’t need that kind of thing. But in any case, I have to go back to the farm because my little girl isn’t well.’
They sat looking at each other, with a soft curiosity.
‘Listen, Martha. I’ve got a week’s leave, so I’m going to the farm for a week. Then I’ll be back in town.’
He spoke as if everything was settled. They had never even kissed, but it was as if they had already loved each other. He did not kiss her now. He got up and said: ‘Well, Martha…’
She smiled, she supposed, but could not say anything. She had understood that to be with Thomas would be more serious than anything yet in her life, yet she did not know how she knew this, and she was not sure it was what she wanted. A few weeks ago she had thought: Thomas, or Joss—a man. Now here was Thomas and he was sucking her in to an intensity of feeling simply by standing there and claiming her.
From the door he smiled and nodded: ‘I’ll ring you when I get back into town.’
He went out. Athen did not come, so Martha cycled home through the streets full of drunks where the National Anthem still sounded from every other building. Anton and Millicent, both dressed up, were just about to go out to one of the hotels. They all greeted each other with smiling amiability: they had agreed they were to be ‘civilized’ and even, if possible, friends. Martha was invited to join them at McGrath’s: as Millicent said, a war doesn’t end every day. But on the whole she thought not: they went out, and she went to bed.
Chapter Four
‘Public opinion changes.’
A couple of decades, a decade, in these rapid days even a year, demonstrate how suddenly the season of a belief can turn. Into its own opposite, the rule seems to be—or at least, often enough to make it safe to ignore the exceptions.
This was Martha’s first experience of it. Last time there had been a change, she had changed with it. Four years before, the present ‘politically conscious’ Martha had been born, out of—that’s what it amounted to—The Battle of Stalingrad. How odd that ‘a busybody who ran around all the time’ (Anton had said it again only last night) could be born out of a great battle thousands of miles away. Which was a ridiculous thought: Martha found herself sitting with a smile on her face, when the speaker on the platform was in the middle of a sentence about people starving to death in Europe.
But the hall was half full, and the audience were restless, not because they were bored, far from it, but because they were angry with the speaker. Martha ought to be making up with her appreciation for their lack of it. The chair she sat in had a hard edge which cut across the back of her thighs. It was very hot. When she stood up, her pink dress would be marked by a wet line, unless she—she wriggled forward on her seat, and Anton gave her a look—do be still!
This winter, Professor Dickinson was saying, millions of people in Europe would be without enough to eat; the children would be marked for life by what happened to them; thousands would die. Yet international capitalism was quite prepared to…
A man shouted: ‘Cut out the gramophone record and let’s have facts.’
‘Yes, yes,’ shouted several people.
It was the most extraordinary thing, being part of this audience. Everything was suddenly different. At the beginning of this same year, 1945, the war still gripped half the world, and when people said: It will soon be over, they did not really believe it. One had only to mention the So
viet Union to create a feeling of warm participation with a mighty strength used for the good and the true. Germany was a sub-human nation so brutalized, so sadistic in its very essence, that it could only expect ‘to work its passage back to membership of the civilized world’ by long, slow degrees. Japan was not far behind in villainy. All these were major axioms. A minor change: six months ago the Tories had governed Britain and, it seemed, always would. But Labour had won the election after all. As for this country, this enormous tract of land nevertheless made unimportant by the fewness of the people it supported—well, its long prosperity, because of the war, was threatened. Its own soldiers returned from various battlefronts, mostly in small numbers, while the RAF left daily in thousands. But if to be in this country was to feel like being churned in a whirlpool, it was no more than what happened everywhere: all over the world human beings were shifting in great masses from one country, one continent, to another: myriads of tiny black seeds trickled from side to side of a piece of paper shifted about in the casually curious hand.
As for ‘the group’, that ridiculous little organism, it did not exist—which was proved by the fact that most of its former members were here tonight, friendly enough, if wary, towards each other.
This was ‘a big meeting’ and therefore everyone had turned out, responsible to the end towards something they had begun and which now was ending. They sat along the back of the Brazen Hall, which was even scruffier and dingier than before, a dozen or so people. ‘There were present Anton Hesse and his wife, Piet du Preez and Marie, Athen from Greece, Thomas Stern from Poland, Solly Cohen, Marjorie and Colin Black, Boris Krueger and his wife, young Tommy Brown, and Johnny Lindsay who looked very ill, but was being supported by Flora.
As for the dozens of others, comrades, friends, lovers, who everyone thought about tonight, because of their sense of an occasion which marked an end, they were all over the world—in England, and Scotland, in America and in Israel. Nearer home, Joss had settled ‘up North’ and Jasmine was living ‘down South’ in Johannesburg.
Coming into the hall, Marjorie had said: ‘Isn’t it awful, when you think…’ And big Piet had said: ‘Man, it gives me the skriks, I can tell you that!’ And Solly had said: ‘OK, so I’m a traitor—but how about closing the ranks just for tonight!’
What could more sharply epitomize the general change than that ‘a big meeting’ should be taking place here, in this dirty little hall, even though the speaker was the famous Professor Dickinson from Johannesburg? Only six months before, it would have been enough to ask the authorities for the big State Hall, to be given it. But permission had been mysteriously delayed until Mrs Van, asking for the reason in person, had been give the verbal explanation that ‘it was not considered desirable that the State Hall should be used for such purposes.’ The letter of refusal had of course been bland: the hall was booked for all the nights they had asked for it. Acting on the sound old principle that ‘they should never be allowed to get away with anything’, Marjorie Black had written in offering the authorities twenty more dates supplied by the obliging Professor. But this letter had earned an exact repetition of the first; the hall was booked for all the mentioned dates. Again Mrs Van, respected Town Councillor, enquired ‘off the record’. And off the record she was told that ‘the Reds’ need not think they would ever get the State Hall again—a decision had been taken and was written into the minutes. And how, Mrs Van had demanded to know, was ‘a Red’ defined these days? Anyone who was a member of the following organizations, she was told.
And what, she asked, had happened to make these organizations unsafe which for at least four years had been respectable? A decision had been taken by whom?
At this tempers had been lost, and voices raised. A chill wind blew—that was all. The atmosphere had changed. ‘Public opinion had changed.’ What people were afraid of—that is what had changed. Fear had shifted its quarters.
Another difference: Mrs Van had said that obviously Thomas Stern could not be chairman. Now during the war, or at least since the end of ‘the phoney war’, the atmosphere had been such that of course a corporal from the Health Corps could chair a public meeting, of course a twenty-year-old aircraftsman could address five hundred solid citizens on revolutionary poetry—one needed no other credentials than one’s enthusiasm.
But Mrs Van had put Mr Playfair into the chair—he who had once been reserved for the most tricky of ‘respectable’ meetings. She had said to Marjorie Black: ‘Really, dear, now that everything’s changed, you must have more sense.’
The hall was less than half full. The faces were all familiar, of course. These were the public who had made so many activities possible, had raised money, given it, bought pamphlets, and applauded every variety of left-wing sentiment. And here they sat, their faces for the most part stiff and hostile. And where were the others?
Well, public opinion had changed, that was all.
Professor Dickinson was a lively, handsome little man, even more vigorous than usual tonight because he thrived on opposition. What he was saying was no more than what had been said up and down these platforms for four years. The Soviet Union had been allowed a truce by the capitalist powers for the duration of the war, since it was taking the brunt of the war against Hitler (who of course had been if not created, at least supported, by the said capitalist powers as an anti-communist insurance) but that now the Soviet Union was exhausted, bled white, had lost its usefulness, the capitalist powers would revert to type and do everything to destroy the socialist country, taking up where they had left off in 1940. The war need never have taken place if Britain had responded to the Soviet Union’s invitation to make a pact against Hitler: the war had suited certain financial interests extremely well, millions of people had died because finance capital was more interested in making profits than in…
This thesis, which until a few months ago would have been greeted by everybody with the over-loud, over-quick laugh of public approval which greets sentiments that have been, or might again be, dangerous, and then with storms of clapping and cries of Yes! Yes!—was now being listened to in sullen silence.
The Professor was saying that within two or three years, Germany the outcast, Germany the fascist beast, Germany the murderer would be the bastion of the capitalist defences in Europe against the Soviet Union, just as Hitler had been during the Thirties. The proof? Already the capitalists, particularly American, poured money into German industry. Why? Out of compassion for the starving Germans? No, because it was necessary that Germany was the strongest country in Europe, divided or not, and he would even go as far as to predict that within five years German troops and American troops and British troops would be marching under the same banners…but he could get no further. The whole audience had risen and were shouting at him ‘Red! Communist! Go back to Moscow!’ Mrs Van der Bylt rose from her place beside Mr Playfair, and since he was not doing more than smile earnestly at the angry audience he was supposed to be controlling, she banged authoritatively on the table with an empty glass.
But no one took any notice.
‘Just like the good old days,’ said Solly, with a loud laugh, and people turned sharply to stare at the group of ‘Reds’ who looked back, with incredulous half-embarrassed smiles. In spite of everything, they could not believe that these people, who had been to all their meetings, who were positively old friends, could now be standing there gazing at them with such uneasy, hostile, frightened faces.
But they had to believe it.
They were beginning to understand what they were in for.
It was during those few minutes while the hall seethed with angry shouting people that ‘the group’ finally realized how little they had achieved during their years of hard work.
For one thing, where were the Africans? There was not a black face in the hall—not even a brown one. The Africans, the Coloured people, the Indians—none were here. Yet when ‘the group’ started work, it was axiomatic that it was on behalf of the Africans above all
that they would run their study groups and their meetings.
Tonight the mysterious Mr Zlentli, the nationalist leader about whom the white people fearfully gossiped, was running a study group for his associates. So Clive de Wet had told Athen earlier in the afternoon, when Athen had suggested that since the white audience was likely to be unappreciative of the famous Professor from Johannesburg, it might be a good thing if the other groups came. But Clive de Wet had said he did not see the point of their risking their jobs and homes for the sake of communism and the Russians.
So in fact their work had been done for the white people; hundreds of white citizens had been pleased to play with ‘the left’ while the war lasted, and now it was all over. And what had happened? The Zambesia News had changed the tone and style of its editorials, that was all. Or at least, there were no other influences ostensibly at work.
The meeting was breaking up. People streamed from both exits, not looking at the platform, where the Professor and Mrs Van der Bylt and Mr Playfair sat smiling philosophically.
Solly shouted: ‘That’s right, go quickly, got to be careful now, haven’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ said Marjorie fiercely: ‘The heat’s turned on, so back they scuttle to their little holes, out of harm’s way.’
Athen said seriously: ‘But comrades, this means a new policy must be made—I suggest we go to the office to discuss it.’
For the moment silence; then people laughed, uncomfortably, for who were ‘the comrades’ now?
‘Yes,’ said Athen, ‘but that is not good, it is not enough that we just go home. We have a responsibility.’
They stood, looking at the fierce little man who was gazing into their faces one after another, insisting that they should agree, become welded together, forget all their old differences. But of course it was not possible.
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